


Post-Script

by SpaceWall



Series: To Take Another Course [3]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, But also, Defining the Relationship, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Established Relationship, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Friends to Lovers, M/M, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-20
Updated: 2021-02-20
Packaged: 2021-03-16 09:34:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,286
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29573973
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SpaceWall/pseuds/SpaceWall
Summary: One year later, Harry, Ginny, and Draco brood, drink firewhisky, and nobody falls off of the roof.OrHarry is slowly turning into his father.
Relationships: Draco Malfoy/Harry Potter, Draco Malfoy/Harry Potter/Ginny Weasley, Harry Potter/Ginny Weasley
Series: To Take Another Course [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1945066
Comments: 8
Kudos: 54





	Post-Script

**Author's Note:**

> CW/TW: references to canonical character death (Dobby). References to past trauma (Harry) and child abuse (Draco).

Harry almost fell off of the roof of Gryffindor Tower when he heard the sound of feet touching down on the shingles beside him. Draco had flown in perfectly silently, with a fine control over his broom that Harry had to admire. He dismounted with equal grace and took a seat. 

“Do you brood competitively, or is it just a hobby?”

Harry backhanded him on the shoulder to shut him up, but couldn’t keep his lip from turning up as Malfoy laughed at his own joke.

“What the hell are you doing up here?”

“Meeting your girlfriend for a snog.” He dodged back as Harry went in for a second smack. A loose shingle flew down towards the ground below. “It’s hard to find somewhere to be alone that doesn’t remind me of sixth year.”

Hogwarts’s classic brooding grounds included the astronomy tower, the room of requirement, and Moaning Myrtle’s Bathroom. All of which Harry had known Draco to frequent that year. “Well, no prizes for guessing what you’re brooding about, I s’pose.”

It was the anniversary of their escape from Malfoy Manner. 

“And you? Isn’t Granger having a memorial for the house elf?”

“Dobby.”

“Dobby,” Malfoy repeated dutifully. Harry didn’t think it would ever stop being odd to hear him being so… conscientious. 

Harry told him, “she did. I just got back from it. She wanted to go down to the kitchen and talk with the other house elves, and I just… couldn’t. Not today. Neville went.”

“You don’t need to do everything.”

If Harry had a galleon for every time someone had said that to him or Neville in the last year, he would have been richer than all of their parents and aunts and uncles combined. 

“You didn’t need to do anything either. But you did.”

“Of course I needed to do something. They would have killed you. They would have called Him.”

Malfoy had dropped ‘The Dark Lord’ from his vocabulary, but still seemed to struggle to replace it. 

“Didn’t need to do anything for Jenny either.” The look he got at that was simply incredulous. It made him happy to know that Jenny was loved and respected by her Slytherin peers, but that didn’t stop her closeness with Malfoy from being strange. Although not, he had to admit, as strange as his own closeness with Malfoy was.

There was the sound of a window being thrown open, and few murmured incantations that were lost on the wind, and Ginny floated out of the window of the girls’ dormitory to join them on the roof. 

“Told you I was meeting your girlfriend here,” Draco said, like an arse.

“I don’t think I even want to know,” said Ginny, with a bemused expression. She leaned against Harry’s side, warm and comforting and good. 

“How’d you find us?”

“Neville said you were brooding. If I’d known it was a brood-off, I would have stayed out of it.”

“Stay,” Draco said, even though she hadn’t asked for permission. “I’m sure you have plenty to brood about of your own.”

“Well, you’d better let me stay. I thought to bring firewhisky.”

Harry considered what his father would say if he fell off of Gryffindor tower and died. “Maybe we should… find a different brooding arena?”

Since Malfoy and Harry had both brought their brooms up, the three of them flew down to the quidditch pitch. As captains – Ginny and Malfoy were, anyways – they knew that nobody had scheduled practice, and while the pitch was still being rebuilt, unsupervised practicing was strictly forbidden. Fortunately, for a prefect, Draco was very good about not bothering with the rules. Almost as much as Hermione could be. 

They sat at the very top of the one row of stands that had already been completed, and passed around Ginny’s bottle of firewhisky. 

“Nobody invited you to the funeral, did they?” Ginny asked, when they were all feeling the fuzzy heat that marked the beginning of being genuinely drunk. 

Draco sighed, and leaned his head back against the wall. “Not my place. Nobody wants their abusers invited to their funeral, do they?”

“You were twelve,” Ginny pointed out.

“I was shit. Both of you should remember that.”

It was true, and they did. But the funny thing about memory was how far away it could feel, sometimes, and the child who had hated Draco more than anything in the world felt lifetimes ago. That child hadn’t known anything about how awful people could be. Or about the goodness Draco was capable of. Perhaps Draco hadn’t even known that at the time. 

“Your father was shit,” Ginny said, “you were a bratty little shit, and you were twelve. There’s a difference. If I thought that was anything like what you are now, you wouldn’t be drinking my firewhisky. Or breathing my air. Or breathing at all, in fact.”

Draco, as if to prove a point, took another drink straight from the bottle. “Anyways. The point is that I was shit to him and I didn’t deserve to be there.”

Harry was speaking before his mind really had time to catch up with his mouth. Normally he had more control – for Occlumency, he had to – but the alcohol made everything slide far more easily. 

“I didn’t deserve to be there either. I think I might have hated him.” Neither of them said anything, but Ginny’s hand on his knee and the way Draco passed the firewhisky to him showed that they were listening. “I didn’t meet him second year, I only heard about it later, and I was just so angry that he tried to protect Neville and not me. Neville was fine! The fucking diary didn’t give a fuck about Neville! It didn’t even know what he was to it.” Draco and Ginny didn’t either, of course. Nobody did, except for their parents, Ron, and Hermione. But they’d probably assume he just meant ‘The Boy Who Lived’. “When he got his hands on it, he threw it away. Neville was strong enough to resist it. And still Dobby spent the whole year trying to save him while it was killing me!” He was keenly aware his voice had risen to a hysterical point, every emotion he’d held for the last year bubbling to the surface.

Harry buried his face between his knees, and there was the cautious press of a hand on his back. At first, he thought it was Ginny, but she grasped his hand tightly, as if trying to keep him there, and he realized it was Draco. 

She said, “you have every right to be angry about that. All of us failed you.”

Of everyone in the world, Ginny had perhaps failed him the least, or was in a close tie with Ron and Neville.

And Draco said, “you’re allowed to have complicated feelings, you know.”

Draco was basically a living case study in how complicated Harry’s feelings could be. “I’m sorry you guys have to put up with all my… everything.”

“We like all your everything,” Ginny said, “and anyways, you put up with ours, don’t you?”

That was true, too. As Harry straightened up, Draco moved to pull his arm away, and stopped when he said, “stay.”

They held that position for a while, quietly growing increasingly drunk until Ginny voiced what they’d all been wondering. “What the fuck are we?”

They were three somewhat-broken teenagers, all in their final year at Hogwarts. One redheaded charms adept, one potions master, one person who looked exactly like James Potter. 

“Do you ever have the uncanny sense you might be becoming your parents?”

Ginny said, “I do have the uncanny sense we might be becoming your parents.” 

Draco just laughed.

**Author's Note:**

> Fin. 
> 
> I hope you liked this!! Comments are love <3


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